Labour Realism

Beneath Labour's supermajority of 412 seats, there are worrying undertows

- Subir Sinha

IN the dying days of his vapid campaign, Rishi Sunak desperately urged voters to prevent a Labour supermajority: it would give Keir Starmer absolute power and would have lasting effects that would ‘wreck Britain’. This seems only to have reminded voters of how 14 years of Conservative rule had actually wrecked Britain. His warning, like the green shoots of economic recovery, came too late. Too many voters wanted to punish the Tories for too many things for them to return to the fold.

Labour’s supermajority of 412 seats is not the outcome of voters peeling off from the Tories and voting Labour: while no doubt some did, if outcomes on some dyed-in-the-wool Tory bastions like Witney, Henley or Maidenhead are anything to go by, the Liberal Democrats, who, at a record 71 seats, were the main beneficiaries of such defections.

As his detractors point out, Starmer’s Labour, in the end, received only 34 per cent of the vote, six points below the last opinion polls, but managed 65 per cent of the seats in Parliament. The Tories recovered from their projected 19 per cent votes to win a mere 18 per cent of the seats with their 121.

Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, another haven for further-to-the-right voters seduced by his sirensong of xenophobic nationalism, polled 14 per cent of the vote but managed merely five seats.

Labour’s own vote was actually split, but less badly than the Tories’, and they managed to gain some support among those who had moved to the Tories previously.

While the electoral map of Britain was transformed from largely Tory blue to Labour red, the supermajority was produced by the geographical concentration of voters, and the first-past-the-post electoral system.